 | Letters from New York |  |
LETTER XXIX.
I went last week to Blackwell's island, in the East river,
between the city and Long Island. The environs of the
city are unusually beautiful, considering how far Autumn
has advanced upon us. Frequent rains have coaxed vegetation
into abundance, and preserved it in verdant beauty.
The trees are hung with a profusion of vines, the rocks are
dressed in nature's green velvet of moss, and from every little
cleft peeps the rich foliage of some wind-scattered seed.
The island itself presents a quiet loveliness of scenery, unsurpassed
and I are old friends, and she has shown me many of
her choicest pictures, in a light let in only from above. No
form of gracefulness can compare with the bend of flowing
waters all round and round a verdant island. The circle
typifies Love; and they who read the spiritual alphabet,
will see that a circle of waters must needs be very beautiful.
Beautiful it is, even when the language it speaks is an unknown
tongue. Then the green hills beyond look so very
pleasant in the sunshine, with homes nestling among them,
like dimples on a smiling face. The island itself abounds
with charming nooks—open wells in shady places, screened
by large weeping willows; gardens and arbors running
down to the river's edge, to look at themselves in the waters;
and pretty boats, like white-winged birds, chased by
their shadows, and breaking the waves into gems.
But man has profaned this charming retreat. He has
brought the screech-owl, the bat, and the vulture, into the
holy temple of Nature. The island belongs to government;
and the only buildings on it are penitentiary, mad house,
and hospital; with a few dwellings occupied by people
connected with those institutions. The discord between
man and nature never before struck me so painfully; yet it
is wise and kind to place the erring and the diseased in the
midst of such calm, bright influences. Man may curse, but
Nature for ever blesses. The guiltiest of her wandering
children she would fain enfold within her arms to the friendly
heart-warmth of a mother's bosom. She speaks to them
ever in the soft, low tones of earnest love; but they, alas,
tossed on the roaring, stunning surge of society, forget the
quiet language.
As I looked up at the massive walls of the prison, it did
my heart good to see doves nestling within the shelter of
the deep, narrow, grated windows. I thought what blessed
little messengers of heaven they would appear to me, if I
of my thought. Alas, doves do not speak to their
souls, as they would to mine; for they have lost their love
for child-like, and gentle things. How have they lost it?
Society with its unequal distribution, its perverted education,
its manifold injustice, its cold neglect, its biting
mockery, has taken from them the gifts of God. They are
placed here, in the midst of green hills, and flowing streams,
and cooing doves, after the heart is petrified against the genial
influence of all such sights and sounds.
As usual, the organ of justice (which phrenologists say
is unusually developed in my head) was roused into great
activity by the sight of prisoners. “Would you have them
prey on society?” said one of my companions. I answered,
“I am troubled that society has preyed upon them. I
will not enter into an argument about the right of society
to punish these sinners; but I say she made them sinners.
How much I have done toward it, by yielding to popular
prejudices, obeying false customs, and suppressing vital
truths, I know not; but doubtless I have done, and am doing,
my share. God forgive me. If He dealt with us, as
we deal with our brother, who could stand before Him?”
While I was there, they brought in the editors of the
Flash, the Libertine, and the Weekly Rake. My very soul
loathes such polluted publications; yet a sense of justice
again made me refractory. These men were perhaps
trained to such service by all the social influences they had
ever known. They dared to publish what nine tenths of
all around them lived unreproved. Why should they be
imprisoned, while——flourished in the full tide of
editorial success, circulating a paper as immoral, and perhaps
more dangerous, because its indecency is slightly
veiled? Why should the Weekly Rake be shut up, when
daily rakes walk Broadway in fine broadcloth and silk
velvet?
Many more than half the inmates of the penitentiary
were women; and of course a large proportion of them
were taken up as “street-walkers.” The men who made
them such, who, perchance, caused the love of a human
heart to be its ruin, and changed tenderness into sensuality
and crime—these men live in the “ceiled houses” of Broadway,
and sit in council in the City Hall, and pass “regulations”
to clear the streets they have filled with sin. And
do you suppose their poor victims do not feel the injustice
of society thus regulated? Think you they respect the
laws? Vicious they are, and they may be both ignorant
and foolish; but, nevertheless, they are too wise to respect
such laws. Their whole being cries out that it is a mockery;
all their experience proves that society is a game of
chance, where the cunning slip through, and the strong
leap over. The criminal feels this, even when incapable
of reasoning upon it. The laws do not secure his reverence,
because he sees that their operation is unjust. The
secrets of prisons, so far as they are revealed, all tend to
show that the prevailing feeling of criminals, of all grades,
is that they are wronged. What we call justice, they regard
as an unlucky chance; and whosoever looks calmly
and wisely into the foundations on which society rolls and
tumbles, (I cannot say on which it rests, for its foundations
heave like the sea,) will perceive that they are victims of
chance.
For instance, everything in school-books, social remarks,
domestic conversation, literature, public festivals, legislative
proceedings, and popular honours, all teach the young
soul that it is noble to retaliate, mean to forgive an insult,
and unmanly not to resent a wrong. Animal instincts, instead
of being brought into subjection to the higher powers
of the soul, are thus cherished into more than natural
activity. Of three men thus educated, one enters the army,
kills a hundred Indians, hangs their scalps on a tree, is
the presidency. The second goes to the Southwest to reside;
some “roarer” calls him a rascal—a phrase not
misapplied, perhaps, but necessary to be resented; he
agrees to settle the question of honour at ten paces, shoots
his insulter through the heart, and is hailed by society as a
brave man. The third lives in New-York; a man enters
his office, and, true or untrue, calls him a knave. He fights,
kills his adversary, is tried by the laws of the land, and
hung. These three men indulged the same passion, acted
from the same motives, and illustrated the same education;
yet how different their fate!
With regard to dishonesty, too—the maxims of trade, the
customs of society, and the general unreflecting tone of
public conversation, all tend to promote it. The man who
has made “good bargains,” is wealthy and honoured; yet
the details of those bargains few would dare to pronounce
good. Of two young men nurtured under such influences,
one becomes a successful merchant; five thousand dollars
are borrowed of him; he takes a mortgage on a house
worth twenty thousand dollars; in the absence of the
owner, when sales are very dull, he offers the house for
sale, to pay his mortgage; he bids it in himself, for four
thousand dollars; and afterwards persecutes and imprisons
his debtor for the remaining thousand. Society
calls him a shrewd business man, and pronounces his dinners
excellent; the chance is, he will be a magistrate before
he dies.—The other young man is unsuccessful; his
necessities are great; he borrows some money from his
employer's drawer, perhaps resolving to restore the same;
the loss is discovered before he has a chance to refund it;
and society sends him to Blackwell's island, to hammer
stone with highway robbers. Society made both these men
thieves; but punished the one, while she rewarded the
other. That criminals so universally feel themselves victims
entirely without foundation are not apt to become
universal. If society does make its own criminals, how
shall she cease to do it? It can be done only by a change
in the structure of society, that will diminish the temptations
to vice, and increase the encouragements to virtue.
If we can abolish poverty, we shall have taken the greatest
step toward the abolition of crime; and this will be the
final triumph of the gospel of Christ. Diversities of gifts
will doubtless always exist; for the law written on spirit, as
well as matter, is infinite variety. But when the kingdom
of God comes “on earth as it is in heaven,” there will
not be found in any corner of it that poverty which hardens
the heart under the severe pressure of physical suffering,
and stultifies the intellect with toil for mere animal wants.
When public opinion regards wealth as a means, and not
as an end, men will no longer deem penitentiaries a necessary
evil; for society will then cease to be a great school
for crime. In the meantime, do penitentiaries and prisons
increase or diminish the evils they are intended to remedy?
The superintendent at Blackwell told me, unasked, that
ten years' experience had convinced him that the whole
system tended to increase crime. He said of the lads who
came there, a large proportion had already been in the
house of refuge; and a large proportion of those who left,
afterward went to Sing Sing. “It is as regular a succession
as the classes in a college,” said he, “from the house
of refuge to the penitentiary, and from the penitentiary to the
State prison.” I remarked that coercion tended to rouse all
the bad passions in man's nature, and if long continued,
hardened the whole character. “I know that,” said he,
“from my own experience; all the devil there is in me
rises up when a man attempts to compel me. But what
can I do? I am obliged to be very strict. When my feelings
tempt me to unusual indulgence, a bad use is almost
the effect intended; but I cannot change the result.”
I felt that his words were true. He could not change
the influence of the system while he discharged the duties
of his office; for the same reason that a man cannot be at
once slave-driver and missionary on a plantation. I allude
to the necessities of the office, and do not mean to imply
that the character of the individual was severe. On the
contrary, the prisoners seemed to be made as comfortable
as was compatible with their situation. There were watch-towers,
with loaded guns, to prevent escape from the island;
but they conversed freely with each other as they worked
in the sunshine, and very few of them looked wretched.
Among those who were sent under guard to row us back to
the city, was one who jested on his own situation, in a
manner which showed plainly enough that he looked on
the whole thing as a game of chance, in which he happened
to be the loser. Indulgence cannot benefit such characters.
What is wanted is, that no human being should grow up
without deep and friendly interest from the society round
him; and that none should feel himself the victim of injustice,
because society punishes the very sins which it teaches,
nay drives men to commit. The world would be in a happier
condition if legislators spent half as much time and
labour to prevent crime, as they do to punish it. The poor
need houses of encouragement; and society gives them
houses of correction. Benevolent institutions and reformatory
societies perform but a limited and temporary use.
They do not reach the ground-work of evil; and it is reproduced
too rapidly for them to keep even the surface
healed. The natural, spontaneous influences of society
should be such as to supply men with healthy motives, and
give full, free play to the affections, and the faculties. It
is horrible to see our young men goaded on by the fierce,
speculating spirit of the age, from the contagion of which
into madness, or driven to crime, by fluctuating changes
of the money-market. The young soul is, as it were, entangled
in the great merciless machine of a falsely-constructed
society; the steam he had no hand in raising,
whirls him hither and thither, and it is altogether a lottery-chance
whether it crushes or propels him.
Many, who are mourning over the too obvious diseases
of the world, will smile contemptuously at the idea of reconstruction.
But let them reflect a moment upon the immense
changes that have already come over society. In the
middle ages, both noble and peasant would have laughed
loud and long at the prophecy of such a state of society as
now exists in the free States of America; yet here we are!
I by no means underrate modern improvements in the discipline
of prisons, or progressive meliorations in the criminal
code. I rejoice in these things as facts, and still more
as prophecy. Strong as my faith is that the time will come
when war and prisons will both cease from the face of
the earth, I am by no means blind to the great difficulties
in the way of those who are honestly striving to make the
best of things as they are. Violations of right, continued
generation after generation, and interwoven into the whole
structure of action and opinion, will continue troublesome and
injurious, even for a long time after they are outwardly removed.
Legislators and philanthropists may well be puzzled
to know what to do with those who have become hardened in
crime; meanwhile, the highest wisdom should busy itself
with the more important questions.—How did these men
become criminals? Are not social influences largely at
fault? If society is the criminal, were it not well to reform
society?
It is common to treat the inmates of penitentiaries and
prisons as if they were altogether unlike ourselves—as if
they belonged to another race; but this indicates superficial
those men to prison exist in your own bosom, and have been
gratified, only in a less degree: perchance, if you look
inward, with enlightened self-knowledge, you will perceive
that there have been periods in your own life when
a hair's-breadth further in the wrong would have rendered
you amenable to human laws; and that you were prevented
from moving over that hair's breadth boundary by outward
circumstances, for which you deserve no credit.
If reflections like these make you think lightly of sin,
you pervert them to a very bad use. They should teach you
that every criminal has a human heart, which can be reached
and softened by the same means that will reach and soften
your own. In all, even the most hardened, love lies folded
up, perchance buried; and the voice of love calls it
forth, and makes it gleam like living coals through ashes.
This influence, if applied in season, would assuredly prevent
the hardness, which it has so much power to soften.
That most tender-spirited and beautiful book, entitled
“My Prisons, by Sylvio Pellico,” abounds with incidents
to prove the omnipotence of kindness. He was a gentle
and a noble soul, imprisoned merely for reasons of state,
being suspected of republican notions. Robbers and banditti,
confined in the same building, saluted him with respect
as they passed him in the court; and he always returned
their salutations with brotherly cordiality. He says,
“One of them once said to me, `Your greeting, signore,
does me good. Perhaps you see something in my face
that is not very bad? An unhappy passion led me to commit
a crime; but oh, signore, I am not, indeed I am not
a villain.' And he burst into tears. I held out my hand
to him, but he could not take it. My guards, not from bad
feeling, but in obedience to orders, repulsed him.”
In the sight of God, perchance their repulse was a heavier
crime than that for which the poor fellow was imprisoned;
influence of Sylvio Pellico might have restored him a blessing
to the human family. If these things are so, for what
a frightful amount of crime are the coercing and repelling
influences of society responsible!
I have not been happy since that visit to Blackwell's
Island. There is something painful, yea, terrific, in feeling
myself involved in the great wheel of society, which
goes whirling on, crushing thousands at every turn. This
relation of the individual to the mass is the sternest and
most frightful of all the conflicts between necessity and free
will. Yet here, too, conflict should be harmony, and will
be so. Put far away from thy soul all desire of retaliation,
all angry thoughts, all disposition to overcome or humiliate
an adversary, and be assured thou hast done much to
abolish gallows, chains, and prisons, though thou hast never
written or spoken a word on the criminal code.
God and good angels alone know the vast, the incalculable
influence that goes out into the universe of spirit, and
thence flows into the universe of matter, from the conquered
evil, and the voiceless prayer, of one solitary soul.
Wouldst thou bring the world unto God? Then live near
to him thyself. If divine life pervade thine own soul, every
thing that touches thee will receive the electric spark,
though thou mayest be unconscious of being charged therewith.
This surely would be the highest, to strive to keep
near the holy, not for the sake of our own reward here or
hereafter, but that through love to God we might bless our
neighbour. The human soul can perceive this, and yet the
beauty of the earth is everywhere defaced with jails and
gibbets! Angelic natures can never deride, else were there
loud laughter in heaven at the discord between man's perceptions
and his practice.
At Long Island Farms I found six hundred children, supported
by the public. It gives them wholesome food, comfortable
For this it deserves praise. But the aliment which the
spirit craves, the public has not to give. The young heart
asks for love, yearns for love—but its own echo returns to
it through empty halls, instead of answer.
The institution is much lauded by visiters, and not without
reason; for every thing looks clean and comfortable,
and the children appear happy. The drawbacks are such
as inevitably belong to their situation, as children of the
public. The oppressive feeling is, that there are no mothers
there. Every thing moves by machinery, as it always
must with masses of children, never subdivided into
families. In one place, I saw a stack of small wooden
guns, and was informed that the boys were daily drilled
to military exercises, as a useful means of forming habits of
order, as well as fitting them for the future service of the
state. Their infant school evolutions partook of the same
drill character; and as for their religion, I was informed
that it was “beautiful to see them pray; for at the first tip
of the whistle, they all dropped on their knees.” Alas,
poor childhood, thus doth “church and state” provide for
thee! The state arms thee with wooden guns, to play the
future murderer, and the church teaches thee to pray in platoons,
“at the first tip of the whistle.” Luckily they cannot
drive the angels from thee, or most assuredly they would
do it, pro bono publico.
The sleeping-rooms were clean as a Shaker's apron.
When I saw the long rows of nice little beds, ranged side
by side, I inquired whether there was not a merry buzz
in the morning. “They are not permitted to speak at all
in the sleeping apartments,” replied the superintendent.
The answer sent a chill through my heart. I acknowledged
that in such large establishments the most exact method
was necessary, and I knew that the children had abundant
opportunity for fun and frolic in the sunshine and the open
all young things to crow and sing when they open their
eyes to the morning light, that I could not bear to have the
cheerful instinct perpetually repressed.
The hospital for these children is on the neighbouring
island of Blackwell. This establishment, though clean
and well supplied with outward comforts, was the most
painful sight I ever witnessed. About one hundred and
fifty children were there, mostly orphans, inheriting every
variety of disease from vicious and sickly parents. In beds
all of a row, or rolling by dozens over clean matting on the
floor, the poor little pale, shrivelled, and blinded creatures
were waiting for death to come and release them. Here
the absence of a mother's love was most agonizing; not
even the patience and gentleness of a saint could supply
its place; and saints are rarely hired by the public. There
was a sort of resignation expressed in the countenances of
some of the little ones, which would have been beautiful
in maturer years, but in childhood it spoke mournfully of a
withered soul. It was pleasant to think that a large proportion
of them would soon be received by the angels, who
will doubtless let them sing in the morning.
That the law of Love may cheer and bless even public
establishments, has been proved by the example of the
Society of Friends. They formerly had an establishment
for their own poor, in the city of Philadelphia, on a plan so
simple and so beautiful, that one cannot but mourn to think
it has given place to more common and less brotherly modes
of relief. A nest of small households enclosed, on three
sides, an open space devoted to gardens, in which each
had a share. Here each poor family lived in separate
rooms, and were assisted by the Society, according to its
needs. Sometimes a widow could support herself, with
the exception of rent; and in that case, merely rooms were
furnished gratis. An aged couple could perhaps subsis
friendly assistance was according to their wants. Some
needed entire support; and to such it was ungrudgingly
given. These paupers were oftentimes ministers and
elders, took the highest seats in the meeting-house, and had
as much influence as any in the affairs of the Society.
Everything conspired to make them retain undiminished
self-respect. The manner in which they evinced this
would be considered impudence in the tenants of our modern
alms-houses. One old lady being supplied with a load of
wood at her free lodgings, refused to take it, saying, that
it did not suit her; she wanted dry, small wood. “But,”
remonstrated the man. “I was ordered to bring it here.”
“I can't help that. Tell 'em the best wood is the best
economy. I do not want such wood as that.” Her orders
were obeyed, and the old lady's wishes were gratified.
Another, who took great pride and pleasure in the neatness
of her little garden, employed a carpenter to make a trellis
for her vines. Some objection was made to paying this
bill, it being considered a mere superfluity. But the old
lady maintained that it was necessary for her comfort; and
at meetings and all public places, she never failed to rebuke
the elders. “O you profess to do unto others as you would
be done by, and you have never paid that carpenter his
bill.” Worn out by her perseverance, they paid the bill,
and she kept her trellis of vines. It probably was more
necessary to her comfort than many things they would
have considered as not superfluous.
The poor of this establishment did not feel like dependents,
and were never regarded as a burden. They
considered themselves as members of a family, receiving
from brethren the assistance they would have gladly bestowed
under a reverse of circumstances. This approaches
the gospel standard. Since the dawn of Christianity, no
class of people have furnished an example so replete with
days of its purity. Thank God, nothing good or true ever
dies. The lifeless form falls from it, and it lives elsewhere.
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